What D’s Should Do: Move to the Center

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Led by the “center-left” think-and-action tank, Third Way, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party is getting organized for battle, but at the moment voters think that the left is defining the party. And they don’t like it.

Only 36% of voters view the Democratic Party favorably and 47% say the party is “too liberal,” an increase of seven percent since 2020. Only 25% of US voters identify as liberal (vs. 34 moderate and 37% conservative), but 49% of Democrats identify as liberal or very liberal on economic issues (vs 28% in 2004) and 69% on social issues (vs 29% in 2004).

The polling message is that Democrats are out of touch with most voters and need to move to the mainstream center. That’s where Third Way is. 

At the moment, progressives like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the liberal organizers of the massive “Hands Off” and “No Kings” protest rallies are dominating the news.

Mamdani, a charismatic 33-year-old state assemblyman and declared Democratic Socialist, just won the Democratic mayoral primary on a platform including a freeze on rent-controlled apartments, free city buses, city-owned grocery stores, universal free child care, tuition-free city colleges, and an increase on corporate taxes from 7.25% to 12.5% along with a 2% tax surcharge on taxpayers making more the $1 million a year. 

A Muslim, Mamdani is staunchly pro-Palestinian and has accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza, apartheid, and war crimes. He also backs the Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, praised Mamdani’s political skills but said “his ideas are bad and his Democratic Socialist affiliation is dangerous and is already being weaponized by the Republicans.” Other critics said his tax increases would drive businesses out of New York. And he’s been accused of being antisemitic, a charge he denies.

Sanders took a short break, but he’s resuming his “Fight the Oligarchy” tour—concentrating on Red States and expecting to attract more large crowds (so far, an estimated 254,000 in 11 states), advocating a “wealth tax” and Medicare for all replacing private insurance.

 And the Democratic base is definitely energized: an estimated 3-5 million attended April 5 “Hands Off” events at 1,400 locations in all 50 states, protesting the Trump administration’s mass firing of federal workers, his tariffs and inflation, cutbacks on LGBTQ protections, and anticipated cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “Hands Off was organized by a 10-year old progressive group, Indivisible.

An even bigger total throng — more than 5 million — attended “No Kings” events in 2,100 locations on June 14, the same day that Donald Trump staged his $40 million military parade to celebrate his 79th birthday, which was attended by 250,000 onlookers (the White House’s figure) or 100,000 according to others.

Participants in “No Kings” rallies organized by Indivisible, the new 50501 movement and 200 other mainly-liberal groups protested Trump’s hyper-aggressive immigrant deportation program, his “Big Beautiful” budget bill heaping money on the rich and giving crumbs to average Americans, and Trump’s efforts to dominate all other branches of government.

The comparatively meager crowds attending Trump’s parade can partly be attributed to a plot uncorked on TikTok to claim tickets to the event with no intention of showing up.

Third Way, formed in 2005 by former Bill Clinton staffers Matt Bennett and Jonathan Cowan, is planning to raise $50 million over five years to fund a “Moderate Power Project” that will combat extremism on the left and right, advocate for moderate policies, try to win back working-class voters to the Democratic Party along with other groups tempted to defect, train cadres of politically-centrist young people to take jobs in Congressional and Executive Branch offices and state governments, educate politically apathetic voters via social media, and “build blue power in red states.”

Third Way is a month away from publishing a specific 2026 policy agenda, but Bennett said it will include helping with the priority task of winning back working class voters, an emphasis on “opportunity” programs — rather than handouts — including expanded training for tech jobs, pressure on corporations to spread jobs “where workers live,” and massive increases in apprenticeships.

In the past, Third Way has advocated for “clean natural gas” and nuclear power, tax increases on the very rich, tax cuts for the middle class and serious efforts to control spending, plus maintenance of and improvement in Obamacare.

In 2024, it supported the “tough”bipartisan border security/immigration plan sponsored by Sens. Chris Murphy, James Lankford, and Kirsten Sinema, which was killed by Trump to preserve immigration as a campaign issue.

Cowan recently wrote a Politico article calling for a middle ground approach to transgenderism, “the defining cultural issue of this time.” He noted that Trump’s most effective ad in 2024 — “Kamala Harris is for they/them — Donald Trump is for you” — was based on Kamala Harris’s 2019 position that prisoners and immigration detainees should get free transgender medical care, including surgery. 

Even though polls show that, by narrow margins, US voters favor acceptance of transgender persons, Cowan implied that the issue helped Trump win the election — and said that Democrats have yet to reposition themselves on the matter.

Cowan recommended that the party adopt a stance “meeting Americans where they are today” — favoring protection of transgender persons from discrimination in jobs, housing and health care but recognizing that there are only two sexes, that athletes should compete on the basis of the sex they were assigned at birth and that minors should receive gender-affirming medical care only with the consent of their parents.

Cowan said Democrats should oppose the cruel policies of the Trump administration—canceling civil rights protections for trans persons, banning them from the military, criminalizing medical care for minors even when parents approve them, defunding suicide hotlines, and refusing to issue passports recognizing a person’s chosen gender — “in fact, trying to erase the very existence of transgender people.”

He said Democrats’ approach to transgenderism has been less onerous than Republicans’ but they “must cancel the transgender language police” who insist upon their using terms like “pregnant people” or forcing the trans to identify themselves by their pronouns. Party members need to have free and open discussion on the topic without fear of being ostracized “for using language that diverges from progressive group think or online orthodoxy.”

Third Way is very clear about how to criticize the Trump administration — by “separating the signal from the noise.” That is, focusing on “things that matter and can move swing voters” rather than “things that matter, especially to people who work in and around government but lack salience with most everyone else.”

The latter category includes Trump’s shuttering USAID, using government power to attack political opponents, firing indiscriminately, and degrading the civil service, releasing J6ers, and blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion. “All are a combination of unwise, unethical, illegal, or unconstitutional. But none resonates much with key voters… It is a painful irony that while our very democracy is at stake, a focus on ‘democracy’ (and the trashing of democratic norms) simply won’t save it,” the group says.

Third Way is just starting to identify “Signal” issues, but its principle is to concentrate on administration actions that “bite” average Americans: stoking inflation and raising prices with tariffs, costing the average household $830 a year, compromising food safety by cutting off funding to the FDA team that “ensures formula is not poisonous to infants and that e-coli is not found in applesauce or hamburger meat.”

Also, defunding disease prevention at the CDC and slashing medical research at NIH; allowing more self-certification by manufacturers and failing to hire sufficient numbers of air traffic controllers in spite of increasing numbers of air crashes and near misses; firing VA crisis line workers who answer 60,000 calls a month; letting DOGE workers access sensitive personal information on data bases at the Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services, the Office of Personnel Management, the Social Security Administration; and gutting Medicaid and the SNAP food assistance program.

Given the public’s negative views of the “too liberal” Democratic Party, party leaders and rank and file members definitely should adopt the Third Way formula: move to the mainstream center “where the votes are.”


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Mort Kondracke
Mort Kondracke
Morton Kondracke is a retired Washington, DC, journalist (Chicago Sun-Times, The New Republic, McLaughlin Group, FoxNews Special Report, Roll Call, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal) now living on Bainbridge Island. He continues to write regularly for (besides PostAlley) RealClearpolitics.com, mainly to advance the cause of political reform.

9 COMMENTS

  1. These guys are has-beens and losers, Mort, and you do yourself no credit by promoting them. They told Clinton to send jobs out of the country, they told Obama to bail out the bankers, and now they’re getting in bed with private equity and crypto, which will fund their fat polling and consulting contracts. They pimp for charter schools. They hate unions. Democratic rank and file voters need Third Way like they need Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. AOC and Mamdani scare the shit out of them. as they jolly well should. AOC and Mamdani represent working people. The Third Way grifters represent their own already fat wallets.

  2. Hold it. Trump won the 2024 election handily this time around and actually won the popular vote. Yet we didn’t see a landslide change in the House of Representatives where the balance is now 220-215. That is not a mandate. That is not a crisis that Democrats are out-of-touch. That fact blows a hole in your entire thesis.

    What it actually signals is that Joe Biden was really bad candidate to be running when the President is blamed for inflation. Simple as that.

    That is not to say that the Democrats don’t have a problem. They can’t seem to reach the 10% of the voters in the middle in swing districts and states that decide elections and instead waste donations on TV ad buys for a group that doesn’t watch TV. This group could care less about nitty-gritty of policy. And it seems pretty clear to me that to reach them needs someone else than than current cardboard cutout leadership.

    What the poll numbers mean to me is that Democrats have bad strategy and bad messaging. They fall into the trap of letting Republicans create the narrative and are always on the defensive as a result. The Inflation Reduction Act was a massive success at on-shoring manufacturing but ask anyone outside of political junkies about it and they’ll know nothing about it. THAT is bad messaging.

    As to Third Way, Democratic Party leaders have come to realize that Clinton-esque pivots to the middle don’t actually gain votes. It just means the Republicans on the right move more to the radical right. It makes it less likely that we’ll get policy wins.

    Hilary Clinton’s loss in 2016 should have been the message to retire the neo-liberal Wall Street friendly policies which characterize the Clinton/Obama/Biden era. It didn’t change anything. We got Clinton/Obama 2.0. And we saw the results.

    Let me break it down simply. In 2008 Jamie Dimon and his quants broke the financial system because they were incompetent and didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Obama printed money like hell to dilute the losses. Interest rates were held artificially low for a decade.

    The big winners were the already wealthy–homeowners, stock investors, executives who cashed in stock options.

    The big losers were working class and young people starting out. High debt. Low pay. Houses priced out of reach. New cars priced out of reach.

    In the intervening years, nothing much as changed since 2016 when Michael Moore predicted that voters would give the middle finger to the establishment and pull the lever for Trump. Trump knows that people are looking for someone to blame. Democrats never punished anyone. And Trump being the manipulator that his his was more than willing to step into that void as strong men do and go after the immigrants.

  3. “Third Way”?
    I am a “moderate” …. tired of the wilderness…..we need a way. Tired of Bernie, AOC and Mamdani “leading the way”
    But easy with calling people names…grifters? Pancreatic cancer? Fat wallets. Really…
    Some ideas I agree with….charter schools.
    I am a Democrat PCO and not pimping for charter schools but my public schools are a mess and I will financially sacrifice before I send my family to them.

    • Why do you believe public schools are a mess and why do you think that neo-liberal policies are the solution? Admittedly no public school is ideal speaking as a parent of SPS graduates (Garfield ’08, ’11).

      The fundamental flaw with charter schools is that you can’t put kids at risk for the market to decide winners-and-losers. A failure in a charter school means those kids in that failed charter school didn’t learn. Statistics show that 4 in 10 charter schools fail within 10 years. So maybe some charters out perform public schools, but it seems like this is at the cost of the kids that go to the charters that fail.

      And I don’t see how you get around the situation where charters hold onto the best students and turn over the difficult ones to public schools address. Privatize the profits and publicize the costs.

  4. What the Dems need is enthusiasm and I somehow can’t see voters getting excited about middle-of-the-road policies. As someone who ran for office three times successfully (once unsuccessfully), I found voters more enthused when I advocated progressive policies — paid sick leave, parental leave and affordable day care among them. Locally, Chris Vance, once a Republican, tried a centrist path statewide and got exactly no where.
    In New York, Mamdani excited voters with progressive promises — some that he may not be able to keep, but at lease he articulated a goal. It’s the Obama “Hope” formula. Let’s work to be better and inspire.

    • Works for Washington State….forever.
      Want to win back Congress and the Presidency?
      Our progressive politics are not popular with most voters.

  5. I Am in the moderate wing of the party and always have been (save for my end the war youthful days in the 60s and early 70s.
    That said, Harris did all the things you advocated, crossing party lines, broad ideas, etc. That didn’t work.
    It’s not so much that we are afraid of a progressive candidate, I think it’s just that they don’t always reflect our views.
    I think it’s just a matter of finding the right candidate.

  6. There aren’t even two ways, let alone three. There is one highly ideological political party, the Republicans – their ideology has varied over time, from the neoliberal supply siders of the Reagan administration to the Trump loyalists of today, and half of it is a sort of anti-ideology against responsible action, but it’s a thing.

    The rest the political field is pragmatic, in the sense that while their policy directions may differ, they generally come with diagrams and explanations. Think Medicare for all is worse than what we have now? Discuss, and then tell me who’s ideological about it. To be fair, there are some soft spots – I think it’s past time for an honest discussion of what DEI and its predecessors have bought us over the last couple generations – but it isn’t an ideological spectrum matter with a clear “center”, it’s still a question of what works. The Democratic party has to be the ones to stand for responsible pragmatism, wherever it takes them.

  7. This is real depressing, it tells me that Dem leadership has learned nothing from the last ten years and that they don’t really have a plan — just tweak a few policy positions and hope that anti-incumbent rage puts them over the finish line.

    I have always been a civic cheerleader and very politically engaged and yet…it is becoming clearer to me that my government is not going to save the day and it is time to make other plans.

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